LECTURE ONE

1.0 INTRODUCTION

1.1 PRE-HISTORY OF WEST AFRICA

Objectives

By the end of this lecture, the learner should be able:

 Explain the origins of west Africa city states

 Describe the characteristics of early city states
 Explain the Origin of Islamic religion

Western Africa, region of the western African continent comprising the countries of Benin,
Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, The Gambia,
Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra
Leone, and Togo. Western Africa is a term used in the Encyclopædia Britannica to designate
a geographic region within the continent of Africa. The term West Africa is also often used to
refer to this part of the continent. As conventionally understood, however, West Africa is
primarily a political and economic designation and comprises all the areas considered here
except Cameroon, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, and the Saharan parts of Mali, Mauritania, and
Niger.

The region may be divided into several broad physiographic regions. The northern portion of
western Africa is composed of a broad band of semiarid terrain, called the western Sudan,
stretching from the Atlantic Ocean on the west to the area of Lake Chad on the east, a
distance of about 2,500 miles (4,000 km). It is largely a plateau of modest elevation and
borders the Sahara (desert) on the north and the Guinea Coast forests on the south. Rainfall in
this region ranges from less than 10 inches (250 mm) in its arid northern reaches to about 50
inches (1,250 mm) in the south. The flora of the western Sudan consists of the scrub
vegetation of the transitional zone known as the Sahel in the north and a mix of tall trees and
high savanna grasslands in the south. Lying south of the western Sudan are the Guinea Coast
equatorial forests, which flourish along the Atlantic coast and extend inland for about 100 to
150 miles (160 to 240 km).
Most of the Sahara and the transitional vegetational zones to its south (the Sahel and the
western Sudan) are drained, where there is enough rainfall to support surface streams, either
southward via the Niger River system or inland to the Lake Chad basin in the east. Along the
better-watered Atlantic coastal areas, the chief features are (west to east) the Mauritanian-
Senegal Basin, drained by the Sénégal River; the Fouta Djallon and Guinea Highlands; the
Volta River and Niger River coastal plains; and the uplands of Nigeria’s Jos Plateau and the
Cameroon Highlands.

Culturally, the people of the region belong for the most part to one of three major language
families. In the northern and least-populous Saharan regions, Arabs and Imazighen (Berbers;
singular Amazigh) of the Afro-Asiatic language family predominate. South of a line
connecting the course of the Sénégal River, the Niger River, and the southern two-thirds of
Nigeria, Niger-Congo languages are spoken. Along the middle course of the Niger River and
around Lake Chad, Nilo-Saharan languages related to those of peoples farther east
predominate. These peoples are divided into a very complex ethnic mosaic but may often be
conveniently classified by their individual languages.

1.2 Muslims in western Africa

A reasonable body of sources for the writing of western African history begins to be available
about 1000 ce. Three centuries earlier the Arabs had completed their conquest of Africa north
of the Sahara and so came into possession of the northern termini of trade routes reaching
across the desert to western Africa. The lively school of geographers and historians that
flourished in the Muslim world from about the 9th to the 14th century thus secured access to
growing amounts of information about what they called the bilād al-sūdān, the territory of the
black peoples south of the Sahara. The picture of western Africa given in the early Muslim
writings is of major interest. It is apparent that, right from the beginnings of Arab contact, the
organization of the more northerly western African peoples was not solely tribal. They had
considerable towns and cities that were supported by a developed agriculture. They had
organized networks of markets and trade and a developed system of monarchical
government. Kings, whose claim to power was based on descent from the mythical divine
founding ancestors of their ethnic groups, taxed trade and levied tribute on the agricultural
villages through their possession of bodies of retainers who provided them both with military
force and with a hierarchy of officials.
It seems likely that there was an increase in the volume of trans-Saharan trade following the
organization of North Africa under Muslim dynasties and that this growth of international
trade with western Africa stimulated the growth there of internal trade, urbanization, and
monarchical government. Certainly the control of trade, towns, and government in western
Africa became increasingly Islamic in form. But it is quite clear that the foundations for the
economic and political development of the western Sudan were in existence before the time
of contact with Muslim traders or authors. Early Muslim interest was concentrated on two
major western African kingdoms: Kanem, in the east, north of Lake Chad; and Ghana, in the
extreme west, on the borders of modern Mauritania and Mali. The Muslim sources, which are
broadly confirmed by local tradition, indicate that the kingdom of Kanem was being formed
during the 9th and 10th centuries through an interaction between Saharan nomads and
agricultural village communities. But ancient Ghana (not to be confused with its modern
namesake, considerably farther to the south and east) had already reached levels of
organization that presuppose several centuries of continuing development.

The earliest extant Arabic reference to a kingdom of Ghana dates from the early 9th century.
In the middle of the 11th century, the Córdoban geographer AbūUʿbayd al-Bakrī described its
capital, court, and trade in some detail. The capital was made up of two towns, a stone-built
town inhabited by the Muslim traders and a mud-built one of the local Mande in which the
king had his walled palace. Their centres were six miles apart, and the whole of the
intervening country was more or less built up. The considerable population was supported by
the produce of surrounding farms, which were watered from wells. The court displayed many
signs of wealth and power, and the king had under him a considerable number of satellite
rulers. A principal part of his revenue was derived from regular taxes on trade. The mainstay
of this trade was the exchange of gold, which Ghana’s own merchants brought from lands to
the south, for salt, which the northern traders brought in from salt deposits in the Sahara.

Al-Bakrī’s description is broadly confirmed by archaeology. The region in which ancient

Ghana was situated contains the ruins of a considerable number of stone-built towns that
must have been supported by extensive agricultural and commercial activity; those at
KoumbiSaleh are generally identified with the capital described by al-Bakrī. The relatively
extensive Muslim interest in Ghana was undoubtedly due to its importance as a source of
gold. Kanem seems to have been less important commercially; the main interest of the
Muslim authors seems to have been in the quasi-divine status of its kings, which offended
their Muslim principles. Other western African kingdoms undoubtedly existed at this time,
but the Muslim sources record little of them beyond their names and approximate locations.
Thus between Ghana and Kanem was Kawkaw, perhaps the nucleus of the later Songhai
kingdom of Gao. Malel, to the south of Ghana, may similarly have been a prototype of the
later Mande kingdom of Mali, which ultimately was to eclipse and absorb Ghana itself.

There are perhaps three possible—and not mutually exclusive—explanations for the origins
and development of the kingdoms that Arab trade and scholarship had revealed by about
1000 ce. The first is that they were the result of the invasion of agricultural territory by
pastoralists from the Sahara who belonged to the Libyan Amazigh groups who spoke a non-
Semitic language and were the dominant group of North Africa before its conquest by the
Arabs. This is the explanation often given in western Sudanese traditions and chronicles.
From roughly the 15th century onward, many of these were preserved by local authors who
wrote in Arabic and were Muslims, and who thus had some incentive to link the history of
their peoples with that of North Africa and with the adjacent Middle East. It was also the
explanation favoured by European historians of the later 19th and earlier 20th centuries when
Europeans were themselves conquering and colonizing black Africa. There thus evolved the
so-called ―Hamitic hypothesis,‖ by which it was generally supposed that any progress and
development among agricultural blacks was the result of conquest or infiltration by
pastoralists from northern or northeastern Africa. Specifically, it was supposed that many of
the ideas and institutions of tribal monarchy had spread through Africa by diffusion from the
ancient civilization of There can be no doubt that over the centuries pastoralists from the
Sahara have indeed advanced and conquered southward. But not all of these were Libyan
Imazighen; some, such as the dynasts of Kanem, were black African in language and culture.
Nor is it easy to understand how mobile desert pastoral groups could be effective transmitters
of ideas and institutions from the settled civilization of the Nile valley to other agricultural
lands in western Africa. It would seem more probable that conquering pastoralists who did
succeed in establishing new kingdoms and dynasties in western Africa should do so by taking
over existing monarchies, perhaps city-states or even ―village-states,‖ and amalgamating
these into larger units. Some early western African traditions can certainly be interpreted in
this sense.

This leads to the second explanation for the origins and development of monarchical
statehood among the western African groups. There is archaeological evidence for the
evolution of a cattle-herding and agricultural economy among a mixed population of Libyan
Imazighen and black agricultural peoples (now called Ḥarāṭīn) in the Sahara by at least 4000
bce—i.e., more or less contemporary with similar developments in the Nile valley. The
desiccation of the Sahara and the evolution of its present desert between about 8000 and 2000
bce must have occasioned an outflowing of population in which the blacks concentrated in
the savannas to the south of it. There, in favourable riverine or lacustrine environments, it
seems reasonable to suppose that the same desire to avoid conflicts over land and water rights
and to control and exploit agricultural surpluses, which had led in the exceptionally fertile but
extremely constricted environment of the Nile valley to the dramatic kingship and civilization
of the pharaohs, should have occasioned the evolution of similar if less spectacular
monarchies. It should be noted, however, that the major western African monarchies known
to the Arabs by approximately 1000 ce were situated not in the well-watered lands along the
Sénégal and Niger valleys nor around Lake Chad but north of these, in the less favoured
agricultural territory between them and the southern edges of the Sahara. This suggests that a
third factor in the evolution of these northern monarchies was the influence of long-distance
trade. The western African kingdoms had their own resources of iron, which in some cases
were being worked by about 500 bce, but they imported other metals, notably copper,
together with horses, luxury manufactures, and—above all—salt, a vital commodity that was
scarce in all of western Africa except the coastlands. In exchange they could offer gold,
ivory, certain agricultural commodities, and slaves. The exchange across the Sahara of such
commodities probably goes back to times before the establishment of the modern desert. The
emergence of the desert did not lead to the cessation of the trade but meant that its surviving
pastoralists were encouraged to organize regular trans-Saharan expeditions for trade and
plunder. It is known from Herodotus and other classical authors and from surviving rock
engravings in the desert that horse-drawn chariots were in use in the Sahara by about 500 bce.
Chariots would have been used for short raids rather than for trans-Saharan trade. But the fact
that the engravings are deployed along two principal lines, from the Fezzan and southern
Morocco toward the upper Niger and Sénégal rivers, suggests a North African interest in the
alluvial gold of these rivers. This could well have occasioned the 6th-century Carthaginian
expedition led by Hanno to explore the possibility of direct sea trade with western Africa
along the Atlantic coast. Despite this expedition, the Carthaginians do not seem to have been
capable of opening up a regular sea trade with western Africa. The links with western Africa
remained firmly in the hands of the Saharan groups, although, at about the beginning of the
Common Era, camels and other pack animals came into use to supplant the horse-drawn
vehicles.
The profits to be obtained by distributing Saharan and Mediterranean produce in western
Africa, and by controlling the collection and export of the western African commodities that
were exchanged for them, must have been a powerful factor in encouraging the kings of
communities on the southern fringes of the Sahara to extend their rule by conquest over
adjacent similar communities. Control over more extensive territories meant that by tribute
and taxation they could acquire greater stocks of goods for exchange with North Africa and
the Sahara and more clients and slaves to extend their power at the expense of their
neighbours. Some of their increased human power could be mounted on horses, obtained
from the Saharan trade, to increase the mobility and power of their armed forces over the
open savannas. It is tolerably certain that the power of the kings of ancient Ghana, controlling
the export of gold from the Sénégal and Niger valleys, was built up in this way.

In the 10th century the kings of Ghana extended their sway over the Ṣanhājah, the congeries
of Amazigh nomadic groups living around Audaghost, just north of their kingdom, who
supplied them with salt and North African goods.

This move must have upset the economic balance between agricultural Ghana and the
pastoral Ṣanhājah, and ultimately it provoked a reaction. Like the North African Imazighen,
the Ṣanhājah were already to some extent Islamized, and they shortly found in a militant,
puritanical version of Islam the means to eliminate their differences and to unite in the
movement known to history as the Almoravids. In the middle of the 11th century, they began
to expand into the productive lands on either side of the Western Sahara, and it would seem
that later in the century they dominated Ghana.

One important result of this domination, following as it did upon some centuries of trading
contact by Muslims, was that the ruling and merchant classes of the western Sudan became
converted to Islam—though in the case of the rulers the conversion was for many centuries
not wholehearted. The justification for a king’s claim to enforce his rule over his subjects,
who remained pagan, was his descent from the original ancestor who had first settled the land
and, by accommodation with its deities and spirits, had developed and controlled it for
agriculture. If he were not to be rejected and replaced as king by a rival member of its royal
family, he had to continue to observe the ancestral and land cult rites in which he was the
principal figure.

However, the depredations of the Almoravids’ herds and their internecine quarrels must have
undermined the prosperity of agriculture in a marginal environment and would have
accelerated the decay of Ghana. More southerly Mande groups, many of which had formed
satellite kingdoms of the Ghana empire, began to act independently and to compete among
themselves for primacy. Eventually about 1235, in the time of a king called Sundiata, the
Keita kings of Mali, in the well-watered and gold-bearing lands of the uppermost Niger
valley, gained ascendancy and incorporated what was left of ancient Ghana into their own
considerably more extensive empire.

The Keita clan seem originally to have been traders from lower down the Niger, and the
strategy of their empire was to extend their power down river to the Niger Bend and to its
trading cities of Timbuktu and Gao, which lay at the foot of the shortest trans-Saharan routes.
The initial success of the Almoravids and their subsequent rapid decline had upset the
stability of the more westerly caravan roads leading to Ghana, while by the 13th century
Ifrīqīyah (Tunisia and eastern Algeria) and Egypt provided more stable bases for trans-
Saharan trade than did Morocco. The Niger River provided a natural means of
communication from Mali and its goldfields to Timbuktu and to Gao and also provided
Mali’s merchants with the possibility of opening up trade elsewhere in black western Africa.
By the 14th century, Mande merchants, the Dyula, were trading as far east as the city-states
of the Hausa, between Lake Chad and the Niger. By about the same time they had also begun
to develop a new trade route southeastward from Jenne (modern Djenné, Mali), on a
southerly tributary of the Niger, toward goldfields that were being opened up along the Black
Volta and further south still, in what is now modern Ghana.

These Mande merchants were Muslims, and their activities led to a considerable expansion of
Islam among the trading classes of western Africa and, with the qualification mentioned
earlier, also among its kings. Thus the first conversions of Hausa monarchs seem to date from
the 14th or 15th centuries. The Mali kings themselves valued Islam for the commercial and
diplomatic advantages it gave them, and some of them, of whom the best known is Mūsā I of
Mali (1307–32), made notable pilgrimages to Mecca via Egypt. As may be seen from
IbnBaṭṭuṭah’s account of his travels in 1352–53, the essentially pagan society of the western
Sudan became open to a considerable degree of Islamic influence, and literacy and even
scholarship became firmly established in its major cities.